The history of valuations is extensive and dates back to the early times of recorded history. For many centuries, people have been evaluating and appraising the monetary value of non-commodity items like, land, real-estate, jewelry, precious minerals, art, antiques, insurance and even businesses. From the beginning of written history until about 1500 A.D., appraisals were in demand for trade purposes and by governments, which required the appraisals to levy proper taxes.
In the early 1500's, methods of determining the value of real property were used to determine the value of land rented out by churches or nobility. In the mid 1700's the practice of valuation expanded dramatically, primarily due to expanded land ownership by private individuals and businesses. In the mid 1800's, at the ascendancy of the industrial age, a professional class of appraisers was created to support burgeoning economies. During the mid 1900's new property like industrial equipment, construction equipment, transportation vehicles, infrastructure, and financial debt started to be appraised in mass. Many specialized businesses sprouted up around the task of valuation. In 1834 A.D. the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, one of the first professional appraisal organizations, was created in London to focus on land and real-estate appraisal and valuation. In the later part of the 1800's, new financial instruments like stock, options, futures, and bonds started to be appraised and traded based on such valuations. Furthermore, new intangible items like copyrights, trademarks, and patents also started to be appraised for value.
Today, almost any tangible or intangible item which may be bought, sold, or traded, may be appraised manually by a trained individual. While the digital age of computers and the Internet have allowed many types of appraisals to become automated, computers and the Internet have also introduced new types of intangible property such as web sites, domain names, virtual advertising space, web traffic, user-created content, and syndicated information feeds. The values of some of these new types of property may depend on many factors making manual gathering of information, appraisal, and valuation a complicated an expensive procedure. Accurate automated information gathering and appraisal of these intangible properties, as of yet, been unavailable.
The inability to automatically and accurately appraise web sites has created a broad lack of understanding of web site value in the market for buying and selling web sites. This has, in turn, led to limited market participation because of the high costs associated with available manual appraisal methods. Additionally, the inability to efficiently and accurately appraise and value web sites has led to the development and maintenance of web sites with less value to web users, financers and online advertisers.